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Despite the smoke, the radio says the fire won’t reach them until early in the evening. The mood in the house is strange, like what Miriam imagines the decks of theTitanicmust have been like in those long hours after the iceberg pierced the hull, when the boat had not yet begun to sink. There was still time, not to alter how things would end, but to prepare oneself for what was inevitable—or to pretend it wasn’t. Even once they resume preparing to evacuate, crossing from the house to the cars and back while Patches sits curious and watchful beside the front door, nobody seems willing to say the worst aloud: that the next time they come back, it will almost certainly be to blackened ruins. Where will they go? Where will they live? Back to Egg Harbor, maybe, to scrape up whatever pieces remain of the life they used to have and try to make them into something new.
A time to get, and a time to lose.
It’s time, it seems, to lose everything.
The Whispers looms magnificent as ever against the sky, like a man who’s been told he will hang tomorrow at dawn and is determined to stand tall until his last breath. They drive out the front gate sometime just after four o’clock, Miriam’s parents in their wine-colored Buick Special and then Smith in his battered black Ford, with Miriam in the passenger seat and a trio of nested boxes in between them, stacked so high that she can’t even see Smith’s face when she looks crosswise, only the creased top of his brown hat. Something rattles inside the boxes and she tries to remember what it could be—the clinking and clanking of china, or maybe tin—as she rests her forehead against the car window. A teakettle? A typewriter? The green glass bowl that Mother murmured over like a prayer while the sky turned black above them?
The little village is busy, the roads full of army jeeps and army men called in to help fight the fire, the trucks and men alike dressed inthe same shade of olive drab. Smith pulls to the curb in front of the post office and lights a cigarette. Miriam’s parents have parked just ahead and are standing on the sidewalk, arguing about whether to make space in the car by sending some boxes ahead by post. Miriam rolls the window down to listen, but the wind has begun to blow and carries their voices away; instead, she hears a group of men trading snippets of information about where the fire has already been and which roads are still open for evacuation.
“Shan’t be long now,” one of them says, his voice weary but calm. He gestures farther down the road, where a group of soldiers has piled into a jeep and is driving slowly toward them, followed by a truck filled with local men, all packed like sardines into the back with their faces turned to the wind. Soon this village will be a ghost town, abandoned to the flames while its residents head north, across the bridge to the mainland. Miriam and her family will be among them, and she wonders what will come after, and then decides just as quickly that it hardly matters. Her uprooted family will be planted again, if not here then somewhere else, and she resolves here and now to be peaceful about it. To accept the change with the same cheerfulness as Edward’s little dog, who never seems to mind where he is as long as he can curl up beside someone familiar. It’s a comforting thought: that wherever she sleeps tonight and tomorrow, it will at least be with the familiar weight and warmth of Patches at her feet.
But Patches is not here.
Miriam’s stomach lurches horribly as she twists in her seat, peering back into the cluttered car. Hoping against hope for any sign of the dog, for a glimpse of white fur or a littleyipto contradict what she already knows. She can see it in her memory: Patches at his post just inside the door, the curious cock of his head as he watched them pack up the car. He’d lain there quietly for an hour—right up until Smith stumbled over him so that he and his armful of packages nearly went sprawling. Smith had hollered, and Patches had fled back into the house, out of sight.
And out of mind. They’d left him behind.
“Oh no, oh no,” Miriam gasps, and above the rim of the stacked boxes, Smith’s hat twists in her direction. “We have to go back. The dog, we left him. We have to go back!”
There’s a pause before Smith answers. When he does, the sound of his dark chuckling is the most hideous thing Miriam has ever heard. “Kid, have you lost your mind?” he says, and the chuckle turns into a hacking laugh. “There’s no going back now. But don’t fret, I’m sure your pops will get you another dog. Maybe even one of them fancy breeds, like a Pe—”
But Miriam never hears what Smith has to say. Not just because his voice is drowned out by the sudden shriek of the fire whistle, three quick blasts, and not just because of the sudden commotion as every one of the men standing watchfully on the street springs into action. Miriam isn’t in the car anymore. She’s running down the street, her shoes slapping hard against the pavement, her skirt whipping around her legs. She’s waving and shouting at the truck full of men that has just passed, shouting at them to stop,stop, damn you,and then letting go a ragged sob of relief when it does.
“Are you going to Hull’s Cove?” she gasps, and though the men exchange looks, a voice from the middle of the group speaks up.
“Ayuh, we’re headed up that way. But the wind will shift soon, miss, and the fire’s holding its own. I don’t think—”
“I don’t care what you think,” Miriam says, and reaches her hand out. The man who spoke hesitates for only a moment, then reaches out and hauls her up into the truck. As he does, she looks full into his face and lets out a little laugh of recognition: it’s the same man she saw in the street yesterday, the one with the prominent ears, the one who was there the day she jumped from the ledge. She almost asks him if Theodore is somewhere fighting the fire, but then the driver hollers back, “All set back there?” and one of the men thumps the cab roof in response, and it’s all she can do to cling to the sideboards as the truck begins to roll forward.
“Always jumping into things, aren’t you,” says the man with the ears, chuckling, but then he turns away before she can answer and nobody else says a word. The last thing Miriam sees as the truck rolls around the corner is her parents, their faces stricken, their argument forgotten, gazing in her direction but not seeing her. Their eyes are lifted toward the sky, where a coal-black haze has risen up to blot out the sun. And just beneath it, flickering over the far-off top of the great hill that shadows the town, the light of the coming fire.
By the time they reach the turnoff to the shore drive and the Whispers, she can hear the distant roar of the flames. The wind coming down the road is fiercely hot, blowing dry leaves and dust that make her eyes burn and water. The truck slows just enough that she can drop off the back, and the man in the passenger seat leans out, shouting at her as they pull away.
“You’ve got a bit of time yet,” he yells above the gusting wind. “But whatever you came for, get it and get back fast. Some men and equipment will be coming this way in no more than fifteen minutes.”
Miriam nods.
Then she runs.
She reaches the house more quickly than she expected, her feet flying over the crushed stone drive as a haze settles between the trees, the light growing soft as a sunrise. The quickness of her journey is her first stroke of luck. The second comes when she runs up to the door and finds it unlocked—another thing forgotten in their hurry to leave—and the house as dark and quiet as a tomb inside. She calls the dog’s name as she runs through the house, first toward the library where he sometimes slept at Papa’s feet, then through the dining room, the kitchen, up the stairs and back down, her shouts of “Patches!” growing shriller as she searches his favorite spots and finds them empty. She goes again to the library, again to the kitchen, up to her room where she kneels to look under the bed and finds nothing but the dusty outline where her suitcase used to be.I savedthat but not him,she thinks, and her next exhalation is half sob, half scream.
“Patches! Here, boy!”
But there’s no answer, the dog doesn’t appear, and now there’s no time. Miriam’s wristwatch tells her that she must leave now, leave or be found standing alone in the road as the fire comes over the hill. She’s weeping in earnest now. Sobbing for the dog she can’t find and for the brother she lost as she struggles to her feet and back down the stairs. Her eyes burn with the smoke and her own tears, and she sees with alarm how the shadows have deepened as she hurries back through the hall and down the stairs. She’s still weeping when her foot catches on the last step and she stumbles, flailing gracelessly into the foyer, failing to regain her balance and instead sprawling flat on her belly. There’s a terriblewhooshas the breath flies out of her lungs and then panic: she tries to take her next breath and finds her diaphragm frozen. She rolls to her side, fingertips scrabbling at the marble floor, clawing for air—and in the last moment before her diaphragm releases and her lungs draw another breath, she hears it.
Coming from the water closet under the stairs, the sound of tiny claws scratching against the door.
She flies to her feet, still gasping, and flings the door wide. A ball of white fur streaks past her, then doubles back to run between her legs. She reaches down to scoop the dog up, burying her face in his fur for just a moment before she tucks him inside her coat, clutching him tightly. She allows herself one moment more to wonder how he got trapped in the powder room and grinds her teeth in anger as she realizes the likeliest answer. Then she runs, out the way she came, out toward the drive and the road beyond, where she will climb aboard one of the equipment trucks and ride back to town. Already, she can see how it will happen: How she’ll find her family where she left them, or maybe even somewhere along the way. How she won’t apologize, just hold up the dog by way of explanation, knowing Papa willunderstand. How she’ll tell her father, when the time is right, that his old friend Smith closed Patches up in the water closet, knowing full well that he would be trapped and left behind.
But she won’t do any of these things. And when the truck that would have taken her back to the village passes by just minutes from now, there will be no girl standing in the road waiting to hitch a ride.
The trees that line either side of the drive are on fire. Flames encircle their bases like burning bracelets, then race upward to engulf the trunk, the branches, the dust-dry leaves. The air is filled with the crackle and burst of trees exploding, the heavy thud of branches as they plummet to the ground and keep burning. Miriam tries to take another breath and chokes, gagging on the smoke, whirling this way and that in search of a way out. She feels Patches wriggling against her, feels herself losing her grip. She dives after him as he slips from her arms, scrabbling across the ground to grab at a fistful of fur and skin, shouting at him to stay—and this is her third stroke of luck. As she scrambles after the dog, a thunderous crack sounds from overhead. A moment later, the highest trunk on the huge maple tree that hung out over the roof of the north wing splits cleanly in two, and crashes down in the place where she had been standing, raining down a cascade of sparks as it shakes free its burning leaves.
Miriam is dimly aware that she once again has Patches in her arms.
She is also dimly aware, as she struggles back to her feet and runs toward the sea, that her hair is on fire.
The gardens are already ablaze as she flees along the stone wall and down the steps, the fire leaping higher and higher as the hedges crackle and burn and burst, showering her again with sparks. She beats at her head with one hand to smother the flames as she flees across the smoldering grass and onto the pier. Thinking only of getting away from the fire and toward the water—and realizing only when she turns to look back, too late, that she wasn’t thinking clearly.There is nowhere to go. The fire is at the pier, and then on it. The first board begins to burn, then the second, the flames whipped by the wind. And Miriam, trapped on the rickety pier with a seven-foot plunge between herself and the churning, frigid sea, will either burn or drown.
